Can we build a mile-high skyscraper?

Chase Tower in downtown Houston is 1,002 feet tall and is the 12th tallest building in the United States. At last count it’s in the top 75 tallest buildings in the world.

Burj Khalifa. (Wikimedia)

At present the world’s tallest building is the Burj Khalifain Dubai. Completed in 2010, the building cost $1.5 billion, or about twice as much as the Houston Texans. It is 2,717 feet high.

Even taller is the planned Kingdom Tower, in Saudi Arabia, which could open in 2018 and will be 3,281 feet when it’s finished.

That’s 0.62 miles. The question is how tall could we build?

The following video, produced by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, provides some fascinating answers. The chief limiting factor seems to be transportation, that is the construction of elevators that can quickly move people from the ground to the top.

Another hurdle is cost, and the diminishing rate of return of going ever higher. Perhaps this is why the current tallest building has been built in a wealthy emirate like Dubai.

From a basic engineering standpoint, there do not appear to be problems that clever engineers could not overcome.

Along these lines The Atlantic interviewed William Baker, chief structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. He helped design the Burj Khalifa. “We could easily do a kilometer,” he said. “We could easily do a mile. We could do at least a mile and probably quite a bit more.”

Houston could do worse things than build such a structure to become a major tourism draw — and we could call it the Houston Tower. Of course the economics are especially wretched in a city where there’s plenty of room to build.